Snazy

http://news.sky.com/home/world-news/article/16107369

What do you think about this story, and would it bother you if it was adopted by the UK ?

The Zohan

as long as they do the same thing with bottles of alcohol, fatty/unhealthy/junk foods and drinks then that's is just fine.

Luan Pra bang

I am fascinated by what the goverments of the world will do for tax if they do manage to stop the next generation of smokers.'
I could see though that the smoking companies will start selling packets for packs that still have the branded logo on. If they want to be really clever they could start selling branded cases and try to add an extra snob value to them by having special high quality stainless iCases and so on. If the smoking companies can manufacture more brand and case snobbery into smoking it wil probably make them more money.
Whats to stop Benson and hedges coming with a free gold coloured case and and extra special metal gold coloured case when you have bought fifty packs.

Gear Head

iTrader: (2)

Exactly. The whole thing has got out of hand now.
It used to be fashionable to smoke, now it isn't blah blah blah.

I don't really care as long as it is not blown in my face.

Are we a free country or not?

(coming from an occassional smoker)

The Zohan

from memory the tax revenue from cigarette/tobacco sales was 11bn and the cost to the NHS was 8bn. 3bn profit in 2008/9

I get a little tired of smoking being seen as the biggest evil to health when in fact obesity is more of an issue - a reduction in the 10,000's of cheap/rubbish fast food outlets and images of liposuction/fat and heart disease created by overeating and eating the wrong foods printed on fast food and junk food containers in the high streets and supermarkets would seem to be a better use of time and money in preventing many problems associated with poor diet and obesity which will be the scourge of the NHS for years to come.

Yes smoking kills, no doubt about it but it is not SATAN!

JackClark

Smoking in Australia is a rich mans game, I bought a packet of tobacco earlier this year, it was over £20!!

Gear Head

iTrader: (2)

Apparently, living in Australia is a rich mans game.
I understand the cost of living in Aus is 3 times as high as here.

ReallyReallyGoodMeat

I think the comparison with fatty foods is quite weak. Although not the healthiest, in moderation fatty food is not detrimental to your health, and it is still food, and we need food to survive, and unless you are throwing it at people around you, fatty food has no impact on the health of others around you.

Smoking on the other hand, serves no purpose other than to make you addicted.

Luan Pra bang

Smoking kills people early hence reduced bills in age related disease and reduced pension payments etc so the net benefit is higher than 3 billion. Given our ageing population we better hope alot of those old buggers start smoking quick.

Gear Head

iTrader: (2)

Are we a free country?

ReallyReallyGoodMeat

To a degree.
We are not allowed to own semi-automatic guns, I do not feel that means we are not free.

GazTheHat

Changing a picture on the packet will not change things.

Gear Head

iTrader: (2)

Yes or no.

The answer is yes, although our government would like you to believe something else!

The Zohan

yes people need to eat to survive, it is what they choose to eat, if we all abstained from fatty/junk food and tok regular exercise - even just walking to andf from the local shops then obesity would hardly exist. No one needs to eat junk/rubbish foods but they do because they want to and in some cases addicted to it/cannot get enough of it. not unlike smoking or alcohol really in that way.

as i said obesity and related illnesses - diabetes, heart disease joint/mobility problems (pretty much all from eating the wrong things through choice) is a bigger threat to health and to the NHS than smoking and this is getting worse every day.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...ry/3562321.stm
http://www.hoylesfitness.com/general/upstream-medicine/
http://www.nhs.uk/Change4Life/Pages/...hy-living.aspx
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/228756
http://www.medic8.com/healthguide/articles/obesity.html

I'll stick with my point as i think it a valid comparison

ReallyReallyGoodMeat

But the problem with obesity is not with the food itself, but with people's attitude to food. Why stick a tax on or ban something that most people with the remotest amount of self-respect and will-power can healthily enjoy?! You can still get fat eating 20 oranges a day, so we'll always have fatties roaming the streets, regardless of what food is taxed or banned.

Lee247

Do they really think the colours/pics on a packet of cigs make them more attractive and will encourage youngsters to start smoking. If they do, they are being very naive.
It's not the box folks are interested in, it's the contents

Snazy

Its about product recognition within advertising and the everyday world. People will just become accustomed to the plain boxes and associate and relate to that instead. Its a very temporary measure.

RobsyUK

iTrader: (2)

I used to smoke and even if i still smoked those pics wouldn't put me off.

There are not signs showing a body splattered all over the road all because you can cross the road and it 'could' happen.

It may put sqeeamish kids off. The thing that stopped me was the £££..

The Zohan

really, that simple, read on! http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...f-science.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/0...ain/index.html
http://fitperez.com/2011-07-05-scien...r#.TrwK3HJngnQ
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...-to-fat-eating
http://drjennybrockis.com/addicted-t...ng-your-brain/

Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Cupcakes may be addictive, just like cocaine.

A growing body of medical research at leading universities and government laboratories suggests that processed foods and sugary drinks made by the likes of PepsiCo Inc. and Kraft Foods Inc. aren’t simply unhealthy. They can hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs.

“The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We are finding tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.”

The idea that food may be addictive was barely on scientists’ radar a decade ago. Now the field is heating up. Lab studies have found sugary drinks and fatty foods can produce addictive behavior in animals. Brain scans of obese people and compulsive eaters, meanwhile, reveal disturbances in brain reward circuits similar to those experienced by drug abusers.

Twenty-eight scientific studies and papers on food addiction have been published this year, according to a National Library of Medicine database. As the evidence expands, the science of addiction could become a game changer for the $1 trillion food and beverage industries.

If fatty foods and snacks and drinks sweetened with sugar and high fructose corn syrup are proven to be addictive, food companies may face the most drawn-out consumer safety battle since the anti-smoking movement took on the tobacco industry a generation ago.

‘Fun-for-You’

“This could change the legal landscape,” said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity and a proponent of anti-obesity regulation. “People knew for a long time cigarettes were killing people, but it was only later they learned about nicotine and the intentional manipulation of it.”

Food company executives and lobbyists are quick to counter that nothing has been proven, that nothing is wrong with what PepsiCo Chief Executive Officer Indra Nooyi calls “fun-for- you” foods, if eaten in moderation. In fact, the companies say they’re making big strides toward offering consumers a wide range of healthier snacking options. Nooyi, for one, is as well known for calling attention to PepsiCo’s progress offering healthier fare as she is for driving sales.

Coca-Cola Co., PepsiCo, Northfield, Illinois-based Kraft and Kellogg Co. of Battle Creek, Michigan, declined to grant interviews with their scientists.

No one disputes that obesity is a fast growing global problem. In the U.S., a third of adults and 17 percent of teens and children are obese, and those numbers are increasing. Across the globe, from Latin America, to Europe to Pacific Island nations, obesity rates are also climbing.

Cost to Society

The cost to society is enormous. A 2009 study of 900,000 people, published in The Lancet, found that moderate obesity reduces life expectancy by two to four years, while severe obesity shortens life expectancy by as much as 10 years. Obesity has been shown to boost the risk of heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea and stroke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The costs of treating illness associated with obesity were estimated at $147 billion in 2008, according to a 2009 study in Health Affairs.

Sugars and fats, of course, have always been present in the human diet and our bodies are programmed to crave them. What has changed is modern processing that creates food with concentrated levels of sugars, unhealthy fats and refined flour, without redeeming levels of fiber or nutrients, obesity experts said. Consumption of large quantities of those processed foods may be changing the way the brain is wired.

A Lot Like Addiction

Those changes look a lot like addiction to some experts. Addiction “is a loaded term, but there are aspects of the modern diet that can elicit behavior that resembles addiction,” said David Ludwig, a Harvard researcher and director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Children’s Hospital Boston. Highly processed foods may cause rapid spikes and declines in blood sugar, increasing cravings, his research has found.

Education, diets and drugs to treat obesity have proven largely ineffective and the new science of obesity may explain why, proponents say. Constant stimulation with tasty, calorie- laden foods may desensitize the brain’s circuitry, leading people to consume greater quantities of junk food to maintain a constant state of pleasure.

In one 2010 study, scientists at Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida, fed rats an array of fatty and sugary products including Hormel Foods Corp. bacon, Sara Lee Corp. pound cake, The Cheesecake Factory Inc. cheesecake and Pillsbury Co. Creamy Supreme cake frosting. The study measured activity in regions of the brain involved in registering reward and pleasure through electrodes implanted in the rats.

Binge-Eating Rats

The rats that had access to these foods for one hour a day started binge eating, even when more nutritious food was available all day long. Other groups of rats that had access to the sweets and fatty foods for 18 to 23 hours per day became obese, Paul Kenny, the Scripps scientist heading the study wrote in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The results produced the same brain pattern that occurs with escalating intake of cocaine, he wrote.

“To see food do the same thing was mind-boggling,” Kenny later said in an interview.

Researchers are finding that damage to the brain’s reward centers may occur when people eat excessive quantities of food.

Sweet Rewards

In one 2010 study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas in Austin and the Oregon Research Institute, a nonprofit group that studies human behavior, 26 overweight young women were given magnetic resonance imaging scans as they got sips of a milkshake made with Haagen-Dazs ice cream and Hershey Co.’s chocolate syrup.

The same women got repeat MRI scans six months later. Those who had gained weight showed reduced activity in the striatum, a region of the brain that registers reward, when they sipped milkshakes the second time, according to the study results, published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience.

“A career of overeating causes blunted reward receipt, and this is exactly what you see with chronic drug abuse,” said Eric Stice, a researcher at the Oregon Research Institute.

Scientists studying food addiction have had to overcome skepticism, even from their peers. In the late 1990s, NIDA’s Volkow, then a drug addiction researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, applied for a National Institutes of Health grant to scan obese people to see whether their brain reward centers were affected. Her grant proposal was turned down.

Finding Evidence

“I couldn’t get it funded,” she said in an interview. “The response was, there is no evidence that food produces addictive-like behaviors in the brain.”

Volkow, working with Brookhaven researcher Gene-Jack ****, cobbled together funding from another government agency to conduct a study using a brain scanning device capable of measuring chemical activity inside the body using radioactive tracers.

Researchers were able to map dopamine receptor levels in the brains of 10 obese volunteers. Dopamine is a chemical produced in the brain that signals reward. Natural boosters of dopamine include exercise and sexual activity, but drugs such as cocaine and heroin also stimulate the chemical in large quantities.

In drug abusers, brain receptors that receive the dopamine signal may become unresponsive with increased drug usage, causing drug abusers to steadily increase their dosage in search of the same high. The Brookhaven study found that the obese people also had lowered levels of dopamine receptors compared with a lean control group.

Addicted to Sugar

The same year, psychologists at Princeton University began studying whether lab rats could become addicted to a 10 percent solution of sugar water, about the same percentage of sugar contained in most soft drinks.

An occasional drink caused no problems for the lab animals. Yet the researchers found dramatic effects when the rats were allowed to drink sugar-water every day. Over time they drank “more and more and more” while eating less of their usual diet, said Nicole Avena, who began the work as a graduate student at Princeton and is now a neuroscientist at the University of Florida.

The animals also showed withdrawal symptoms, including anxiety, shakes and tremors, when the effect of the sugar was blocked with a drug. The scientists, moreover, were able to determine changes in the levels of dopamine in the brain, similar to those seen in animals on addictive drugs.

Similar Behavior

“We consistently found that the changes we were observing in the rats binging on sugar were like what we would see if the animals were addicted to drugs,” said Avena, who for years worked closely with the late Princeton psychologist, Bartley Hoebel, who died this year.

While the animals didn’t become obese on sugar water alone, they became overweight when Avena and her colleagues offered them water sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.

A 2007 French experiment stunned researchers when it showed that rats prefer water sweetened with saccharine or sugar to hits of cocaine -- exactly the opposite of what existing dogma would have suggested.

“It was a big surprise,” said Serge Ahmed, a neuroscientist who led the research for the French National Research Council at the University of Bordeaux.

Yale’s Brownell helped organize one of the first conferences on food addiction in 2007. Since then, a protégé, Ashley Gearhardt, devised a 25-question survey to help researchers spot people with eating habits that resemble addictive behavior.

pimmo2000

iTrader: (6)

That just looks to me like you're trying to justify smoking with an argument of "well there are other bad things too" pretty weak.

The Zohan

no, not at all but the pressure on smokers/smoking is 99% about health and costs to the NHS/society - i am saying that there are other things that are more of a problem, that's all but smoking seems to be the big evil, there are bigger evils is all i am saying.

ditchmyster

iTrader: (7)

I see a guy who is 20 and weighs 140 kilos and is the same height as me 5'11. i weigh 75 and i'm not a streak of bacon either, but about right for my size.

He IS addicted to coca cola,and is never without a 1litre bottle.

It comes as no suprise to me that people are addicted to the sugar salt and various other crap that goes into processed food,and i am sure in years to come we will discover that these foods have been engineered by food scientists in the employ of these companies to be exactly that.

Almost everything i eat is cooked using fresh ingrediants by myself, bar the odd tin of beans,tomatoes, tuna and mackrell, i won't touch a processed meal.

But i do smoke a bit when i'm over in croatia but not in uk so swings and roundabouts.

Salt and sugar will kill you just as quickly as smoking if not quicker.

EddScott

Whether the packet is plain or not may reduce take up of smoking but not much. I smoke but not much. Sometimes go days without having one.

Jaybird-UK

From the comments;

2009-2010 tax income from cigarette sales £10.5 billion
2009-2010 cost of treating smokers on the NHS £2.7 billion

As a none smoker I'm happy that bars and pubs are now smoke free but please leave it down to personal choice FFS, I doubt very much that a shiny box would make you start smoking. The branding only helps you decide which cigarette.

Takeaway food should atract a further 1%/2% tax towards obesity management and costs to the NHS

Terminator X

iTrader: (7)

Perhaps it costs more to look after the smokers than it brings in via taxes?

TX.

Edit - oops, just read the stats above

Simon C

Not quite true, you can own semi auto rifles chambered for .17hmr and .22LR.

I feel we are slowly loosing our freedom to choose what we want to, its smoking now, next it will be junk food, then .......


On a side note, I'm on Champix now, and for a 1 month supply the cost to the NHS is £54. However I've only been in hospital once, this is my first pescription since I was 14, and I've paid taxes since I was 19 (now 34). I think the Govt have had their moneies worth out of me.

Lisawrx

iTrader: (1)

Apparently not.

I smoke and I couldn't care what pack they come in. I don't smoke the packaging.

Seriously though, I don't think packaging really makes people want to smoke, or not as far as I've heard from people I know. I have never had somone say to me that they started smoking because they liked the box the cigarettes come in. (not that I'd rule it out, I just doubt it's a common reason to start).

markjmd

iTrader: (11)

What people seem to forget about the balance between tax-revenue and NHS costs is that the impact on people's ability to lead productive lives after contracting a smoking-related disease will often go far beyond the immediate medical treatment needs of dealing with the disease. There's the fact they could be off work for months or years, if not the rest of their lives, and even if they do return might only be able to do so at a far reduced rate than what they were capable of before. In many cases there'll also be a secondary impact on family and friends, through loss of income, inability to take care of their basic personal needs, inability to participate in previous shared activities etc etc.

For anyone making the argument that further bans on advertising are anti freedom of choice, ask yourself this question:
if we've had decaffeinated coffee in the shops for decades, why is it that not a single one of the major tobacco companies has yet released (or even tried to produce, AFAIK) a nicotine-free form of tobacco? It's hard to imagine that it can be any harder to do, from a technical perspective, yet it would be the perfect bolster to the claim that banning smoking denies people a simple and relatively low-cost pleasure, that does no real harm to anyone but the person doing it. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Lisawrx

iTrader: (1)

I thought (possibly wrongly) that tar and other nasty chemicals were far more of a problem in cigarettes than the actual nicotine Not that I am saying nicotine is harmless.

Lisawrx

iTrader: (1)

Mark, to follow on from what you have said...

I see where you are coming from and I would never say smoking is a good thing, or doesn't have it's risks, but so does living full stop. We could all try to adopt the healthiest lifestyle possible, but it doesn't leave us risk free. I had a friend pass away recently who had never smoked and rarely drank/didn't eat crap and she died of cancer before she hit 40. My Mam, granted used to smoke years ago but quit shortly after I was born, was hit with breast cancer. There are countless stories like this, and plenty of ones where you hear people have smoked for years without any problems.

People get ill (and die) and all the things you mention can happen whether smoking is a factor or not.

As I've said, I'm in no way saying smoking doesn't carry risks, I'm merely pointing out that the same sort of problems occur in people getting ill for different reasons. Ok, it is a choice to smoke and a choice to take the risk, but life is full of different risks and possibilities, and we just never know for sure how things will work out.